by Abby Frucht
“About eighty,” I tell her, amused that she is asking me so many questions. It’s clear she’s impatient. Our roles are reversed; it is I who am leading this particular expedition although I’ve not yet told Danka on whom we are supposed to be spying.
“Imagine,” I say to Danka. “Imagine a man who, when he runs into you in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere, pulls his cap out of his pants and puts it on only so he can tip it.”
“He ran into you?” says Danka.
“I mean, we saw each other.” But that’s not exactly it either, of course.
“Oh. So you’re in love. Congratulations. I thought you had a wanderful marriage.”
“I do. It’s not love. I only want to know all about him. I don’t want to do anything.”
“Why not?” Danka asks.
I shrug, not knowing the answer, not knowing, suddenly, if what I said is true.
“I have a feeling he is what is known as unsavory,” I say.
She perks up.
“Yes?”
“I ran into him once on one of my routes,” I tell her. “It was a long time ago. He was calling his dog, who was standing behind him the whole time, nosing around his boots. He had on a Western-style denim shirt with embroidery on it, and I complimented him. He usually wears just T-shirts. I said, ‘That’s a nice shirt,’ and he said something really strange. I mean, it struck me as strange at the time, although I haven’t really thought about it since. But….”
“But what?” asks Danka, doing leg lifts. Her narrow black sneakers hover above, then slowly begin to descend.
“But now that I’m curious about him… … He told me where he got the shirt. You know where he told me he got it? At that shopping mall in New Jersey where that sniper shot some people a couple of years ago. That’s exactly what he said: At that shopping mall in Jersey where that sniper wasted a bunch of people.”
The sneakers stop in mid-air. “So you think…”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It just never even occurred–”
Danka snorts. “But you find him interesting.”
“Yes.”
“Exciting.”
“Well…,” I answer, suddenly smitten again. “It’s not love. Just curiosity.”
“Oh, yes. Curiosity. You mean you want to know what it feels like to sleep with a man whose wife kicked him out because he’s an asocial slob who fucks like an ape.”
“How do you know that about him?” I ask. “How do you know what you said?”
“Pardon?” says Danka.
“You heard me,” I say.
“I’ve never spoken to him in my life,” Danka says. “I’ve never so much as petted his dog, God forbid.”
“What’s the dog’s name?” I ask testily.
“I don’t know anything about him. Except he has a wanderful soft belly and his pants are slipping down always because he has no bottom.”
“Christ,” I say. And then, “I wouldn’t think she kicked him out, exactly. I think she left him. I think she left him because he’s unbalanced.”
“Unbalanced,” says Danka thoughtfully. “I suppose you think the rest of us are balanced? I suppose you think that unlike yourself I am perfectly matched with my perfectly balanced husband? I suppose you think William is perfectly balanced? Do you know what he’s reading these days? My husband? He is reading the autobiography of a librarian. Does that make him balanced?”
“I think she needed some space,” I go on. “I think she wanted to be alone.”
“Me, too,” says Danka.
“You want to be alone?”
“No way,” says Danka. “I’ve had enough alone. I’ve had alone all my life. How many people do you think there are, that I will never see again? How many hugs and kisses that I can never return? I don’t understand the past forty years of my life, Liz. I don’t know what the point of it’s been. It’s been so untraumatic, so uneventful, so un-this, so un-that, but I don’t trust it, you know? I think it’s playing a game, and it’s waiting till I figure out the rules. And now I’ve figured it out. All I need is a good long cry, forty days, forty nights, that kind of cry, and then I can kiss it goodbye, and then my life can start again. But I can’t do it, you know? How can I cry about William, of all the ridiculous things. And that’s what I like about him, you know? I could cry about him if he’d give me a reason to.”
“About who?” I ask, although I know very well who she’s talking about. It’s Joe. It’s got to be.
“Never mind,” says Danka.
“Never mind what?” I ask. “Never mind how you know he’s only half-civilized?”
“I never said he’s not civilized. I said he’s not circumcised.”
“Very funny,” I say. “What does he look like?”
Danka is quiet.
“He’s ugly,” I say, and feel keenly the fact of his ugliness as if struck in the eye by one of his slingshot missiles. “He has rotten teeth, right?”
Danka raises her eyebrows, and then we sigh in unison and watch the sky again. A plane soars past against the grain of a cloud, and when it’s gone I believe I can hear the grass growing. How frenetically restful the close of the day seems to me, as if nearing its finish it slows to a halt just short of the first shadow. Is it possible to reach-as in pitch of activity-a pitch of restfulness?
I ask Danka what she thinks.
“Certainly,” she answers. “When you feel so bored you could die.”
I’m insulted. After all, this is my expedition.
“Not restlessness. Restfulness.”
“Oh. Like death.”
“Like absolute, quiet wakefulness,” I argue, and, standing up, lead Danka along the trail away from the smell of daisies among some brambles to the train tracks. We are high up suddenly, on the plateau, dizzyingly close to the sky. This is the spot where I found the pole lamp and the doll, but now I’m looking only for a trail.
It’s nowhere. We head up the tracks, glancing right, glancing left, because I can’t remember just exactly where Joe was when he disappeared.
Perhaps, anyway, the trail was west of the depot, not east.
But here are the same raspberry bushes, still heavily laden, the same spiders still crouching, the same mosquitoes still humming, the same dogs still barking on the tract house lawns. Recalling how I’d felt so lost in the bushes, having pushed my way through them while picking berries, I shut my eyes and ask Danka to spin me around.
We do this, like children. Then I plunge here, plunge there. Still no trail. Maybe it only looked like a trail, with him standing on it. Maybe you need a dog to find it. Maybe if I simply set off… … So I do, but there’s a fallen log, and having reached it I don’t know whether to scale or follow it. I sit down on it. Danka asks me again how hot the day is, and announces that William, probably home by now from shopping, must be worried sick about her.
“He never worries about you when we’re on one of your missions,” I say indignantly.
“True. But I do not leave so suddenly, usually. Usually I do not forget a pot of soup boiling on my stove.”
“Don’t worry about it, Danka.”
“But it will boil over.”
“William will shut off the burner.”
“But he’s shopping.”
“But you said–”
Danka sniffs.
“It was very difficult for me to have made this soup,” she says. A pot of soup, I am thinking. How can a grown woman get worked up about such a thing?
And then I realize it’s not the soup, really. It’s Danka’s old, familiar trouble, come to rescue her again from having too much fun. It must have followed us here. If only we hadn’t returned for her little black sneakers – but even so, it would have found us, sniffing out our peace of mind until it spotted us below. Now it swoops down to fetch us, now it leads us to her car. She insists that I come home with her and eat a bowl of her soup. She puts her hands on her hips again.
“
Soup will make you feel much better,” she says.
I tell her I’m feeling fine. In the car I ask, “What kind of soup?”
Danka doesn’t answer, and remains petulant all the way home. The back of her house is all one long window. There is window in the bedroom, window in the living room, window in the dining room, window in the kitchen. The kitchen proper is William’s domain, I’ve been led to understand, but Danka takes me right up to the stove and hands me a wooden spoon.
“Stir,” she says. “I can’t bring myself to do it. Tell me how you think it smells.”
I lift the lid off the pot. There’s a geyser of steam. At once I smell again the sour odor of her pile of shoes, but it’s not the shoes, after all, it’s the soup, in a big tin pot although Danka – William, actually – owns much better: cast irons, enamels, crockpots, woks. There’s a skylight overhead, and around its bottom edge a cast iron rod holds his prized kitchen tools. He has marble rolling pins, French eggbeaters, beaten copper ladles, spatulas, whisks, and graduated spoons.
Danka doesn’t use any of these. Instead she squats down before a low cabinet and rummages around among cheese graters and flour sifters before withdrawing a plain ladle, the kind I keep in my own kitchen, stainless steel with a plastic grip. Her soup pot is dented, and when she stirs the soup, it wobbles on the burner.
“Well?” she asks.
“Well, what?”
“How do you think it smells?”
“It smells…,” I say searchingly. “It just plain smells.”
“Good,” says Danka. “Choose an apron if you want.”
She pulls open a drawer and flips through the stiffened folds of her husband’s colorful aprons.
“No thanks.”
“Only joking,” says Danka. “But keep an eye on the window and tell me if you see him coming.”
“Okay,” I say, and keep an eye open not for William but for the Tree Man. The tree surgeons are working late; we passed them on our way into the house just a few minutes ago. They were all standing around the big jaws of the truck, except for one who was up in the too-tall pine, wrapping and knotting rope around the limbs, and then, having sawed them, tossing them down. I supposed it was the Tree Man, but it turned out not to be. It was a teenager in overalls. The stiff leather of the holster fit him like a chastity belt. He was gangly and skinny. No feathers. No grace. Maybe the Tree Man quit. On the other hand, maybe he’s sick. I envision a wounded bird lying quietly among dish-towels in a cardboard box, its round breast vibrating under dampened feathers. When he eats, I imagine, it is to suck nourishment from the tip of an eyedrop.
“Is he there?” asks Danka.
“No,” I say, still thinking of my friend and not of William. How worried I am. Somehow I feel responsible for the Tree Man’s well-being. After all, it was I who kicked him out of my house, and out of the bed he’d shared with Gail.
For a minute, I stir the soup again. Such odd soup. Slightly viscous, and yet there is so little substance. A few shavings of – what? – potato? Onion?
Danka edges up close, finds her cigarette alight in its saucer on the window sill, near some parsley William planted in a crock. Danka drags thoughtfully, blows the smoke onto her ladle while cooling the broth. We both watch the smoke as it mingles with the steam.
“That’s an idea,” says Danka, flicking the cigarette over the pot. A column of ash tumbles in in one piece.
She stirs it with the ladle.
“That smoky taste,” she remarks, giving me a smile and the cigarette another flick.
I smile in return. They do this at chili cook-offs, too. Texans do. Sometimes they unroll an entire cigar and dump in the shredded tobacco.
Danka lifts the ladle, holds it to her lips, then drops it back into the pot.
“I’m not ready to taste it yet. I know this is silly. I have to prepare. I have to meditate about it,” she says, and makes for the living room. The Great Room, is what Danka and William call it. It’s a room with no past. It has a freshly laid parquet floor, and its high-beamed ceiling slants toward the plate-glass window. To one side sits a grand piano sheltered by a tall rice-paper screen decorated with clusters of feeding Ibises. The frame looks freshly painted in slick, black lacquer. The piano legs, too, look hot from the lathe. Having sunk down into the couch, Danka reaches behind her for one of William’s executive toys, a wooden elephant on wheels, designed for back massage. She rolls it up and down her arm, shuts her eyes and just sits there. It takes me a minute to remember that we’d come into the Great Room in order to meditate about her soup. I shut my eyes, too, and try to oblige.
“What’s in it?” I ask.
“Turnips,” says Danka, her eyes still closed.
“Turnips,” I repeat, and get up and look out the window at the disappearing pine. With all the lower boughs gone, the tree resembles a broken umbrella, its spokes snapped inside-out.
“Poor tree,” I say, at which Danka jumps up and goes to the kitchen again. She comes back looking hungrier then ever-starved, really-an expression I recall having seen before only in photographs. How pinched she looks, how hollowed-out, how desperate, even, as if she might die.
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
“The soup,” says Danka, and stops the elephant mid-thigh, and looks imploringly at me until I know what it’s about. Turnips, I’m thinking, and cigarette ash. That smoky taste, she’d said earlier, as if to mimic what she’d described in the snack bar so many years ago. What was the scene? The barracks, the smokestacks, the bare earth cracked and frozen, the suddenly spilled soup, the stripe-clad skeletons lapping it up.
Just as, now, there’s her own sudden, drawn, beseeching hunger.
“Try some,” she instructs, when, full of dread, I follow her back to the stove. She sets a half-full bowl on the counter in front of me. The bowl is chipped. I study it, like looking for worms in a rain puddle. What’s in it? A few leaves, a few twigs, muddy water.
Also the ashes, their soft, pale flecks drifting into solution.
I dip my spoon into the bowl, scoop out a few peels of turnip, prepare to blow off the steam.
Except there isn’t any steam. On her earlier foray into the kitchen, Danka must have shut off the burner. The soup is lukewarm with an edge of cold.
I put the spoon back in the bowl, feeling nauseated.
Danka slurps enthusiastically.
Soon she ladles out more, makes a face, reaches into the spice cabinet, unscrews a bottle and drops in a pinch of onion powder. “It’s still not quite right,” she is saying. “There was a flavor, a hint of sweetness I can’t get, what’s that word-pootrid.”
“Putrid,” I say.
“Yes,” says Danka. She eats. I lift the spoon to my lips, slide my tongue into the soup, let it sit there a while. Nothing. Just the sharp metal taste of the spoon. I slide my tongue further into the broth this time, actually nudging a turnip peel. Again, practically nothing, just salt, hot water, and smoke again. I remember a drink that my sister used to make, when she was in college. Hot Lemon Water, she called it, fine for sore throats and when you’d run out of tea. I open my mouth wide.
“Here’s William!” shouts Danka.
Having climbed from his car, he is chatting with the workers. Danka grabs my bowl, dumps it out, rinses it fast in the sink, cradles it in hers and sticks both wet bowls far back into the depths of the low cupboard before tossing both dripping spoons into the garbage. In the meantime I tilt the big pot above the sink and switch on the disposal along with the tap. By the time William comes in, carrying shopping bags full of bottles, we are seated primly at the table reading gourmet cooking magazines.
“What’s that smell?” William asks, wrinkling his nose, but then he sets to work putting the bottles away. He’s purchased four of French wine, two of Californian, several brandies, several six-packs of coolers, a sherry, some rums, some bitters, some saki, some plum wine, several liqueurs, and five ornamental bottles of vinegar all of subtle pinks and ambers. These
he sets in a row on the counter to admire. In each has been suspended a bouquet of herbs. Danka rolls her eyes, flips the pages of her magazine, and carefully rips out a page containing a recipe for oyster stew. She has told me in the past that she secretly rips out whatever she doesn’t want William to make. When William comes back in, I am standing up to go, and for a minute he looks carefully at me before saying, “My goodness. What ever happened? You don’t look well.”
“I feel a little nauseated,” I tell him.
“Let me offer you a ride home,” says William, unloading from the shopping bag a corkscrew, some coasters, and some hightech-looking bottle stoppers.
“That’s okay,” I tell him, but he’s already found his car keys. When Danka rises to accompany us to the door, the soup ladle she’s been sitting on falls on the floor with a clunk and a splatter of wet turnip peel.
“Don’t forget your soup ladle,” Danka says quickly, and gives me a meaningful look.
When William fastens my seatbelt, I feel like a school girl being driven home to supper by a playmate’s rich father. How self-conscious I am; perhaps he believes that I carry a soup ladle with me everywhere I go. If only he would ask me what I’m doing with one in my lap, I might think of a suitable lie.
Instead he only starts the engine, and the tape deck clicks on.
“Renata Tarraga playing Tres Pavanos,” says William grandly.
My Spanish is rusty.
Three peacocks, I suppose, and slide the ladle out of sight between my knees.
But the music turns out to be lovely. It distracts me. William, too. A tendon twitches in his neck in time with the melody, and he never does ask me why I’m carrying a ladle.
DANIEL AND STEVIE are waiting for me on the porch, where night seems absolutely to have fallen; they are rocking in pitch blackness. Stevie holds a box of Band-Aids, Daniel, a blanket and a tiny, lipped beaker of–what?–Sambuca of all things, a drink I haven’t thought of in years. He drops a coffee bean in it and lights it with a match; the liqueur flares indigo, then subsides. Only now do I remember the Doberman pinscher; the way it straddled me, the way I lay there patiently, patiently, and then, afterwards, my surreptitious exit during Daniel’s whispered call to the doctor.